


Kill Our Way to Heaven

by rarelypoetic



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s13e05 Advanced Thanatology, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Episode: s13e05 Advanced Thanatology, episode 13x05 coda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-14
Updated: 2017-11-14
Packaged: 2019-02-02 05:26:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12720534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rarelypoetic/pseuds/rarelypoetic
Summary: The trench coat’s different, but the posture is the same, so characteristicallyCasthat Dean’s throat aches. The figure is poised with sloped shoulders before a payphone in the middle of some isolated suburb. From behind, he looks well put-together for a thing that has just crawled its way back from death.





	Kill Our Way to Heaven

He doesn’t say “Prove it” because he doesn’t care. If the voice on the other end of the phone belongs to a monster, at least he’ll die by a facsimile of Castiel’s hand. 

He thinks of Mia, of the way her patients were picked off one-by-one at the hands of their deceased loved ones. If he’s lucky, the last thing he’ll hear is his voice. _Hello, Dean_ , and then a knife through the gut. Dean can’t imagine a way he’d rather go. 

He’s already died once today. Maybe this time it’ll stick. 

The ride passes entirely in tense silence. Sam does not try to dissuade him, doesn’t try to tell him the chances that they’re driving right into a trap, doesn’t even tell him to be careful. He knows there is nothing he can do to keep Dean safe. Not from this. 

The trench coat’s different, but the posture is the same, so characteristically _Cas_ that Dean’s throat aches. The figure is poised with sloped shoulders before a payphone in the middle of some isolated suburb. From behind, he looks well put-together for a thing that has just crawled its way back from death. 

The car door closing prompts the thing wearing Castiel’s skin to turn around. Dean braces himself so his knees don’t buckle. It’s a damn good mimicry, down to the cowlick in his dark hair and the unkempt look of his ill-fitting suit. Whoever this is did their research. 

And then he catches not-Castiel’s eyes. 

Of all the looks they’ve shared over the near-decade they’ve known one another, this - _this_ \- would have been the one to break Dean, if there was anything left inside of him that could shatter. As it stands, every fragile part of him has been thoroughly reduced to dust. And so it doesn’t break him; it remakes him. 

There is something in the eyes that nothing that has ever imitated or possessed Cas has ever managed to replicate successfully. Even Jimmy himself did not have it. It was less about the specific angle of his hooded eyelids or the particular shade of murky blue and more to do with the feeling that lanced through Dean’s body like an electric current whenever Cas was _looking_ at him like he was now. 

Sam doesn’t feel it like he does, but he knows Dean well enough to recognize the sudden shift in his entire being, from resigned to awestruck. Sam makes a sound in his throat like a cross between a choke and a joyful huff of disbelief. It’s that shock that keeps him rooted in place as Dean’s feet carry him along some invisible line. 

Castiel’s mouth is open, his eyes liquid glass as Dean approaches. When there is little less than a foot between them, something jerks him to a stop, and they stand staring at each other. Then Castiel swallows, and Dean wraps one arm around his neck and the other around his shoulder and holds his breath. Castiel goes quietly, willingly, folding himself into Dean’s embrace like the answer to an unspoken question. 

His own arms come up around Dean’s waist to rest at mid-back, two hot brands against the knobs of his stiff spine. He’s solid, he’s warm, he’s real. He’s _alive_.

When Castiel starts to pull away, Dean braces himself for the rush of cold air that will take his place. But Cas doesn’t go far. He puts enough distance between them so that he can look Dean in the eye, and then he bows his head until their foreheads touch.

The world hushes around them. Every one of Dean senses winks out one by one, until the only thing he can process is the feeling of warm air being shared between them. It’s the most intimate they’ve ever been, yet somehow Dean feels like he isn’t nearly close enough.

He nudges his nose against the sharp angle of Castiel’s cheekbone and says, “I burned your body.” 

Castiel shudders against him, one long undulation. “I’m here now.” 

“I... I built your pyre. I saw-- I _smelled_ you burn.” 

“Dean.” 

Dean opens his eyes. 

“There is no force on any plane of existence that could keep me from you for long.” Castiel smiles, tremulous, soft. “You must know that by now.”

“You... You fucking ruined me, man.”

“I’m sorry,” Castiel begins.

“Don’t be.” Dean breathes. Their foreheads are touching again. “I’m tired of people being sorry. Hell, I’m tired of _being_ sorry. Just...” It takes less than an inch, a hairsbreadth, to bridge the gap between their mouths. It’s not a kiss the way the desperate clutch of a drowning man is not a hug. “Okay?”

Castiel shudders again. “Okay.” 

When they finally separate, Sam is waiting. He hugs Castiel for a normal amount of time like a well-adjusted person, but his eyes are wet, and there are twin tracks of salt down his cheeks. He’s looking at Dean when he tells Castiel, “It’s good to have you back, man.”

Sam gives Castiel the passenger seat for the ride back, and the presence of a tan trenchcoat in his periphery is enough to keep Dean from having a nervous breakdown, but only just. Now that the adrenaline of seeing him again is petering off, he is left with this: a gigantic, gaping hole in the middle of his chest that has been hastily plugged up with a Castiel-shaped entity. 

Dean has spent so long grieving he doesn’t know how not to. He doesn’t know how to reconcile the him of three hours ago with the version of himself now, sitting at the wheel, with a piece of himself returned safe and sound beside him.

The bunker is silent as a cemetery at dawn. Dean steps inside and feels misery steep into his pores like a foul scent, clinging to him wherever it can find a foothold. There’s the war table, where he spent weeks alternately drunk and passed out as Sam picked up empty bottles around him and brought him water. There’s the kitchen, where Dean would sometimes stand at night, alone, knocking back beer after beer until he lost his judgement enough to reach for the top-shelf whiskey. There’s the hallway that leads to Castiel’s old room, which he would stand outside of on some nights, never daring to go in but fixed to the spot regardless, tracing patterns with his eyes into the wooden whirls of the door. 

Sam must sense the atmosphere as well, because he puts a warm hand on Dean’s shoulder as he passes as if to say _I know. Me too._

Castiel is looking around at the walls of the bunker like he’s never been inside before, and Dean can tell by his studious squint that he’s cataloguing all of the little differences, all the things that have changed in his absence. 

Sam makes two cups of tea and hands one to Cas, who accepts it wordlessly. They drink together at the small table situated by the kitchen in amicable silence while Dean putters around the kitchen aimlessly. When he’s done with his tea, Sam gets up and gives Cas another brief hug.

“We should all have a talk tomorrow, figure out how you got back. But for now I’m gonna head to bed. We should all get some rest.” He looks at Cas. “Especially you.”

Castiel ducks his head in a nod and thanks Sam quietly. 

Then they’re alone.

Before Dean can make a judgement call on whether to escape to his room or sit down at the table, Cas gets out of his seat and makes the decision for him. The kitchen has never felt small like this before, even with Sam taking up half of the space in the morning when he makes oatmeal or his shitty organic coffee. 

Dean leans back against the counter and fiddles with one of the beer caps that Sam had missed during his last sweep-through while Castiel trails his hand over the various appliances. 

He pauses at the trashcan in the corner, which is filled with bottles and broken glass from when Dean broke one of the mirrors in the bathroom last week. They haven’t been home long enough to empty it. 

“This place...” he says. “It’s different than the last time I was here. Emptier.” 

Dean swallows. “After you... left, I kind of went off the rails a little. Stopped treating this place like home and more like another motel.”

“But I didn’t live here,” Castiel points out. “The bunker didn’t change after I died.”

If the mood were lighter, if his heart weren’t thundering at breakneck speed behind his ribcage, he might roll his eyes. Instead, he barely manages a shrug. “ _I_ changed.”

Castiel cocks his head. “I’ve been dead before. You’ve _watched_ me die. More than once.” 

Dean’s fists are tight around the edge of the counter. “That’s just it. I can’t do it anymore, man. I can’t keep losing you.” 

“I can’t promise I won’t die again,” Cas says. Before Dean can respond, he adds, “But as I said, I will always come back to you, Dean. In one way or another.”

“How can you be sure of that?” Dean’s voice cracks somewhere in the middle and he shakes himself, frustrated for being so vulnerable. “The next time I watch someone stab you in the chest, the next time I see your wings tattooed on the ground, the next time I burn your body, how can _I_ be sure of that?”

“I would take on every cosmic entity at once, if that’s what it took to find my way to you. And I would _win_.” 

Castiel’s voice leaves no room for argument. That tentative uncertainty he’d come into the bunker with has been replaced by tempered steel. Dean cannot muster that same certainty, cannot come anywhere close to feeling secure in the knowledge that there will never come a day when Cas doesn’t leave him for good. But he has his own certainty: next time, he’ll follow Castiel. Into Hell, into Heaven, into Purgatory, into the unknowable places in between. Next time, he’s not staying behind. 

But saying that aloud would only upset Cas. So he breathes. And he forces his fingers to go slack around the counter. 

“Okay,” he says. “But you better try your damndest to stick around this time. I’m serious, Cas. No more martyr shit.”

“No more ‘martyr shit,’” Cas agrees. 

Something about the skeptical look on his face pulls a smile from the depths of Dean’s chest - his first real smile in weeks. Then something drips off the end of his chin and slides into the divot of his collarbone and he realizes belatedly that he’s crying. 

Cas watches him steadily for a moment before he folds Dean into his body and holds him there while he shakes. Dean’s still crying when Castiel presses his lips to his hair and keeps them there for a moment. He’s still crying when Castiel says, “I love you, Dean Winchester,” into the crown of his head. 

And he’s still crying when Castiel takes his jaw in his wide, sturdy hands and kisses his forehead, his cheek, the corner of his mouth. By the time their lips touch, the tears have mostly dried up, but they still taste salt between them.

“Cas,” Dean says as they part. “Castiel.” Castiel _looks_ at him, and the raw ache of grief sloughs off his soul some. “I love you.” 

The words come out easier than Dean expects. He’s spent weeks saying them in prayer, weeks tearing himself apart with the knowledge that he’d never get to hear it in return. And now here Castiel is, a prayer finally answered.

“I love you,” Castiel echoes. He smooths his hands across Dean’s cheeks. His kisses him, once, chastely. And they stand there together in the dark kitchen for what could be minutes or hours, both unwilling to let go.

**Author's Note:**

> title from "Kill Our Way to Heaven" by Michl


End file.
